To Participate on Thurstonblog

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

........................................................
Wow, The View's resident right-winger was really upset about the "dirty politics" used in the Michigan primary. Poor Elizabeth...
........................................................Hasselbeck Slams Santorum on ‘The View’
by Chris Pursell, February 28, 2012

Elizabeth Hasselbeck, a strong proponent of conservative politics, came out against “Santoruming” ahead of the Michigan and Arizona primaries. The co-host of “The View” spoke today against Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, stating that he was using “dirty politics” in order to win the election following news reports that his campaign was utilizing Democrats in order to best Mitt Romney.

“I am not fine with Santoruming, which is going on in Michigan, because I think he is playing dirty politics in messing with the primary that is open so both parties can vote…” she said to her fellow co-hosts. “He is cold-calling Democrats telling them to vote against Romney and I think it’s muddying the election and muddying the primary.”

.................................................................UPDATE: Anonymll's original post was restored and Wild_Child's was removed. Also, the posts with the profanity were removed.
.................................................................My oh my, a battle royal has been going on! Wild_Childposted, rejoicing, about a piece that turned out to be a hoax (he/she didn't scroll down and read the "gotcha" at the bottom), and when Anonymll called him/her on it, the comments kept disappearing! Anonymll was being stubborn and reposting the response again and again.
.................................................................

Just as I suspected......
A study back in August showed Liberals have a lower average IQ than Conservatives as evidenced by the mess our country is in with the Islamic-rooted 0bama currently in charge.http://iahymnewsnetwork.wordpr...

In spite of getting my post removed three times, it doesn't change the truth, Wild_Child. You DID NOT read the whole item (http://iahymnewsnetwork.wordpr..., so you've been had!

Scroll down to the bottom of that link where it says:Oh yeah, and everything in that bullshit you just read is completely and totally false. There has been no such conclusive study, and all of the “Finds” are based on public paranoia. Chances are good that if you are a conservative, you were empowered by this new find.If you, even for a second, thought this find might be true, you are probably an idiot.

Pity the Party of Lincoln. Gone with the wind is the idea that all men are created equal. Today’s GOP is dedicated to the proposition that we are going to Hell in a hand basket. And if you’re Rick Santorum, you mean that literally.

In the upcoming book “Showdown: The Inside Story of Obama’s Fight to Save His Presidency,” David Corn recounts a brainstorming session before Obama’s speech on deficits. Obama had just returned from Chile, and he was mad.

“I’m going to other parts of the world and they’re showing me investments in infrastructure and innovations in education,” Obama vented to his advisors. “They’re willing to spend money on that. The Republican budget reflects a fundamental pessimism. It says that to get the deficit in line, we can’t afford to be as visionary as these countries, and we can’t be optimistic because they’re not willing to let an extra penny come from high-income people.”

That, from the president’s mouth, is why he will win in November. In a fight between “Yes we can” and “managed bankruptcy,” Americans will always choose optimism that empowers them.

I’d love to claim that’s my idea, but I read it in another book called “Learned Optimism.” Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, got sick of studying depression and turned his attention to figuring out why happy people avoided depression.

Happy people, he found, use specific, positive language while depressives use pervasively negative language. I’m wildly oversimplifying his findings, but his book is useful in figuring out what happened to the Republican Party that used to have a lease on the White House because it owned optimism. Remember “Morning in America”?

If you listened to the Chicken Little Republicans at the Arizona debate, it’s mourning in America. Goodbye optimism, hello managed bankruptcy.

When he wasn’t scraping his congressional record off his shoe, Rick Santorum was telling the Republican Party how bad off we all are. The real problem for Republicans came when CNN’s John King asked about the auto bailout. Santorum tried to agree with Mitt Romney on “what I believe is the best way to resolve these types of problems, which lets the market work, constructive capitalism, as Governor Romney was talking about in his days at Bain Capital, and destructive capitalism,” said Santorum.

Here’s where it got interesting:

“And that means pain,” said the former Senator. “I understand that. But it also means limited government and allowing markets to work because we believe they’re more efficient over time.”

And as much as Romney road-tested his Reagan era rhetoric (“We’ve got to restore America’s promise in this country where people know that with hard work and education, that they’re going to be secure and prosperous and that their kids will have a brighter future than they’ve had.”), he couldn’t get past his blind faith in markets. When defending his opposition to the auto bailout, Romney said, “The market can help lift them out.” Not we, the people, but the abstract market.

In Romney’s vision, people are powerless against “destructive capitalism”. This, according to Seligman, is one facet of pessimistic thinking, and nowadays it qualifies as religious doctrine for Republicans. The contrast to “Yes we can” couldn’t be better for Democrats.

A startling chapter of Seligman’s “Learned Optimism” is how he applied the study of optimism to politics. He found not only that the more optimistic candidate invariably wins, but also that politicians can’t fake optimism. Seligman recounted the 1988 presidential campaign in which Michael Dukakis gave an optimistic speech at the Democratic convention and shot 20 points ahead in the polls. As the campaign wore on and a more pessimistic Dukakis revealed himself in the debates, Vice President George Bush pulled ahead.

Now we have another Massachusetts Governor who can’t hide his bad attitude behind his pretty talking points. The only advantage to trusting the market to solve all your problems is that it is less obscene but otherwise similar in sentiment to the Forrest Gump T-shirt promising that bad things just happen.

During the past two days our pageviews have been up about 40%. I'm thinking that, aside from our resident lurker who loves to log on from a remote site and hit the same page over and over, many of the new readers are anticipating Cherokee's breakout.

Just when you may have thought the ongoing battle between the 99% and the 1% was dying down, it may have beenreignited. A wealthy banker left a $1.33 tip on a $133 lunch at the True Food Kitchen restaurant in Newport Beach, California.

To add insult to injury the word "tip" was circled on the receipt, and the banker wrote "get a real job" on the bill. The picture of the receipt was taken and uploaded to the blog Future Ex-Banker by a person who was dining with the anonymous banker. As expected, the blog received a lot of attention and has now been taken down. The author of the blog wrote, "mention the 99% in my boss' presence and feel his wrath. So proudly does he wear his 1% badge of honor that he tips exactly 1% every time he feels the server doesn't sufficiently bow down to his holiness."

People online who had a chance to see the blog post before it went offline and those who have been made aware of it on social media outlets are outraged. One person called the tip a "tale of greed and contempt," and another referred to it as "arrogance personified." The Web's general reaction to this story is eerily similar to an almost identical 1% vs. 99% scenario that took place last fall. In Washington state, a waitress received a tip of no money and advice scrawled on the receipt that told her she could "stand to lose a few pounds."

My good friend, Michael Crain, has been a star in waiting for two decades in the Northwest. Mail carrier by day, Michael has labored like the rest of the local music scene for the love of the art. I've had the pleasure of playing behind him on several occasions. My guitarist/friend Dave Croston does his recording production.

I'm not a big fan of country music, but I love Mike's whimsy with lyrics. Reminds me of Arlo Guthrie rhyming "orange" with "door hinge".

Passers-by ignore injured, crawling carjack victim, 86: Aaron Brantley, 86, a World War II Air Corps veteran, knocked to the ground during a carjacking on Detroit’s west side, crawled across the gas station parking lot as people walked by. No one stopped to help, he says.[snipped]
..................................................

..........................................Gingrich warns of role of “secular left’’Ken Thomas, February 26, 2012Newt Gingrich warned members of a Georgia church Sunday that the “secular left" is trying to undermine American principles established by the Founding Fathers as he sought to rejuvenate his presidential bid.

The former House speaker is bypassing Tuesday’s Republican presidential primaries in Michigan and Arizona and spending most of the week in Georgia, which he represented in Congress for 20 years. Gingrich said at a church north of Atlanta that Americans have faced a “50-year assault" by those trying to alienate people of faith.

“The forces of the secular left believe passionately and deeply, and with frankly a religious fervor, in their world view and they will regard what I am saying as a horrifying assault on what they think is the truth," Gingrich said. “Because their version of the truth is to have a totally neutral government that has no meaning."

Gingrich’s campaign has struggled since winning South Carolina’s GOP primary on Jan. 21, watching as Rick Santorum has emerged as Mitt Romney’s chief rival. Gingrich is trying to regain traction in Georgia, Tennessee and a group of Super Tuesday states voting March 6, hoping to amass delegates to the national nominating convention.

He told reporters Sunday that “we have a pretty high likelihood of winning" in Georgia. “I think it’s central to the future of our campaign. We’re going to do everything we can to win here."

He has stopped short of saying a loss in Georgia would end his campaign, stating the Republican contests are likely to extend deep into the spring.

At First Redeemer Church, Gingrich said the nation’s founding was supported by people of faith, saying those principles were under attack by the Obama administration.

“You loan power to the government, the government does not loan power to you," Gingrich said.

The former speaker also criticized President Barack Obama’s decision to apologize for the burning of Qurans at a military base in Afghanistan. The incident has led to violent riots in Afghanistan, in which four U.S. soldiers have been killed.

Gingrich said George Washington would not have apologized for an incident that led to the killing of young Americans. “We are supposed to apologize to those who are killing us? I don’t think so," Gingrich said to applause.

At the outset, the thrice-married Gingrich told a few thousand congregants that he was not speaking to them “as a religious leader, and I don’t come here as a saint," referencing the attention that his previous marriages gained earlier in the campaign.

“I come here as a citizen who has had a life that at times has fallen short of the glory of God, who has had to seek God’s forgiveness and had to seek reconciliation," Gingrich said.

Later, before another church audience in Milner, Ga., Gingrich spoke about his efforts to secure the GOP nomination and win the White House when a member of the congregation yelled, “You will!"

“This is up to God and the American people," Gingrich said. “I don’t want to be presumptuous."

We welcome CherokeeNative, who applied for membership to ThurstonBlog. An invitation has been sent to CherokeeNative's email address that was submitted and upon receipt, this person can register and participate.

We look forward to many submissions by this clever, intelligent blogger.

For those wanting to join, summit your request to yyyyyyyyyy58@gmail.com (we are already spammed with right wing hate sites, so you can save those, although they do make for great fodder)

Note that I posted one of those videos, "The BEST emotional PORN," here. Despite the title, it was hardly offensive - except, I suppose, to the people who are determined to get offended at everything.

No, it wasn't offensive, but it was good at making its point. Don't believe me? You can download the video here and see for yourself.

Yes, it was hard-hitting. Yes, most believers would not like the comparisons. But it wasn't pornographic. It wasn't anything that couldn't be shown to children, even.

But some believers don't want you to see it. Why? Well, probably because it's too effective. Probably because they don't have an answer to it. But that's the thing about free speech - it doesn't have to be popular speech. In fact, popular speech doesn't need protecting.

Don't take my word for it. If you didn't see the video when I posted it two weeks ago, watch it now.

In one shot at Republican pols that no fair-minded observer would dispute, the president yesterday accused GOPers of “cheering” higher gas prices. Not since the days of the mindless “Drill Baby Drill” chants have we seen so much excitement over pain at the pumps.

As Matt Yglesias calmly explains today, it really takes an amnesiac to yell, as John Boehner has been doing, that gas prices have doubled since Obama took office:

Gas prices are indeed way higher than they were on Inauguration Day. That’s in part because the winter of 2008-09 was the cheapest moment for gas prices that we’ve seen in years. Do we remember what else was going on back then? That’s right—a global financial crisis that tipped the entire world into recession. It turns out that driving to work, ferrying stuff from the warehouse to the store, hauling containers across the Pacific Ocean, and flying around to meetings all takes oil. If you manage to orchestrate a situation in which millions of people lose their jobs, retail sales plummet, stores close, and economic activity generally grinds to a halt, this frees up a lot of extra oil. Cheap oil leads to cheap gasoline, so if you did have a job at the depths of the recession your commute got cheap.

With the global economy beginning to recover, even as countries like China continue to modernize their transportation systems, yes, oil prices are headed back up (helped along, of course, by fears of a war involving Iran, which Obama’s GOP critics are daily blasting him for failing to encourage). But what do you want, asks Yglesias?

[N]othing Santorum or Boehner or Gingrich or Obama says is going to change the fact that the United States is an increasingly small part of the global demand picture. When China, India, or Brazil get richer, their citizens start trading bicycles for scooters and mopeds for cars. They’re flying more airplanes. This increases the global demand for oil and pushes prices up. All else being equal, this is inconvenient for American drivers. But it’s far from clear that it’s on net harmful to the American economy. American firms are hoping to export goods and services to rapidly growing economies. Every time Boeing sells a plane to an Asian airline, that increases the demand for jet fuel and makes driving marginally more expensive. But we’re better off in the fast-growing world than in the slow-growth, cheap-gas world of three years ago.

Unfortunately, turning back the clock to Inauguration Day 2009 is a pretty common GOP objective—when they aren’t trying to turn the clock back to 1964 or 1937.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

My heavens! The fornication is getting out of control! Those evil social engineers at Planned Parenthood are doing everything they can to encourage non-stop sin and murder, and they're making 90-year-old women foot the bill! Pamela, Jesus and I all disapprove and we're not going to just lie back and enjoy this. There are some unmarried young people who live in my neighborhood, and I'm headed over to their house right now to check and make sure they are all still virgins. Luckily, my best Sunday outfit includes gloves.

Praise Jesus! Elioron and Jesus and I all agree that women are using their wombs as WEAPONS! You always hear those liberals whining for gun control, well, the time has come for WOMB CONTROL, so men are no longer at the mercy of feminist biological terrorism. Hithertofore, whenever a decision needs to be made about a fertile woman's body, whether she is allowed to avoid or terminate a pregnancy and thus MURDER a man's child, or bear a child and thus STEAL his money, a council consisting of her husband, her father, her employer and the owner of the grocery store where she shops shall be convened to decide for her. Praise the Lord.

Hallelujah! Thank the Lord that this righteous judge has decided to uphold a grocery store owner's God-given right to dictate morality to his customers! Fornication is a sure ticket to the fiery pits of H E double toothpicks, and those trollops won't start frying there soon enough for me and Jesus and Mr. Stormans. Praise be that someone has shown some sense and put those uppity women in their place!

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

.........................................................
The Zero is now going to limit comments to 250 words.... it was bound to happen after too many people started posting "tomes" (especially MountOlympusxxx with all the copying/pasting). As for CherokeeNative, she was too kind with her responses to Tammy (who surely must know why comments were deleted).... [snort]
.........................................................

CherokeeNative

MODERATOR - I request that my comments be restored as they contained nothing against the rules and were obviously flagged by someone who either doesn't have the stones, or is frustrated that he/she doesn't have the intelligence sufficient to allow him/herself, to do anything except push the "abuse button." Thank you.

Your comments were flagged and removed while I was out of the office. They are no longer in my 'pending' or 'deleted' queues, and cannot be restored. I don't know why they were removed. On a different note, The Olympian recently decided that comments will be limited to 250 words or less. This is not the reason you were deleted, but probably the reason someone is flagging your comments.

There are currently three articles regarding the gay-marriage law being commented on in the O - and in each one, the opponents of gay marriage are condemning the passage of the gay marriage law as being against their religious beliefs.

No matter how many times it is pointed out that civil marriage is a legal status granted by the state and has nothing - I repeat - has nothing to do with reigious marriage, the debate over the opponents' arguments eventually circle back to religion.

This is exactly why the gay marriage law should never be given to the citizens to vote on - beside the fact that the civil rights of a human being should never be a popularity contest - but also, because the opponents cannot set aside their faith and look at the issue strictly from a legal standpoint under the Constitution. Thus, even if the gay marriage law is finally brought to vote by referendum, it will not end there - it will end up in the courts, and although it will prolong the ultimate, gay marriage will eventually become legal not only in the state of Washington, but the entire United States.

The right to marry has been recognized by the US Supreme Court as a fundamental right under the United States Constitution. Government has no business intruding on our personal lives. A Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage would write discrimination into the Constitution. Indeed, the 9th Circuit recently confirmed this when it struck down California's Proposition 8. We do not democratically decide on fundamental rights. People have inalienable rights that cannot be taken away or brought to a vote. A law excluding same-sex couples from marriage simply cannot survive any level of scrutiny under the Constitiution.

Washingtonians have the right to practice their religious faith and there is no reason to intertwine their moral responsibilities under their faith and their moral responsibilities as an American. It is when you try to combine the two that there are problems. For Christians, all you need to understand is that God does not ask that you judge - in fact, Jesus' ministries teaches you otherwise. Christians only need to guide their lives and their childrens' lives under the word of the Lord.

As an American, we have the responsibility of insuring that equal rights are afforded to all. Look to your history as an American. For many, but for the Constitution, they would not be allowed to vote, they would still be required to ride at the back of the bus, or worse, their bodies and that of their children's would be the property of someone else to do as they choose.

Follow Jesus' teachings and let God do his job (judge not lest ye be judged), and you do yours as an American - As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now
practically read it "all men are created equal, except homosexuals."